Pragmatic Analysis Of The American Presidential Debates In 2004

Taking the 2004 American presidential debates as the language material, this thesis is an investigation into the utterances of the two candidates in presidential debates by means of pragmatic theories. It first points out that the purpose of presidential debates is to win more votes, thus winning the presidential campaign. And the thesis is to analyze how the two candidates try to realize this purpose through linguistic strategies. Then, it summarizes three linguistic features of the presidential debates: employment of modal auxiliaries and non-factive verbs at the lexical level; choices of tenses and voices at the syntactical level; application of repetition and rhetorical questions at the rhetorical level. After that, the thesis attempts to explore the discourse of the 2004 American presidential debates with main pragmatic theories, that is, employment of Pragmatic Presupposition, incarnation of Speech Act Theory, fulfillment of Cooperative Principle, violation of Politeness Principle and application of Relevance Theory. It is found through analysis that, in the presidential debates, the two candidates' employment of linguistic choices and pragmatic strategies has the following effects: acclaiming themselves, attacking the opponents, clarifying their own policies and defending their own standpoints, thus achieving the objective of persuading the voters to vote for them.